Some older Wansview, TP-Link, Wyze and Imou are also supported.
Part of the reason these cams are sold so cheap, and are directly imported into the US by the brand owners, is because they're making all of their money from the subscriptions. It's also the reason why buying a single camera is actually cheaper than buying a pack.
Since Thingino targets retail devices at the top level rather than components, when you install our firmware you get an image made specifically for your device. We can give you easier installation methods than using a flash programming in many cases, and once your camera is flashed, all of its functions work out of the box.
Also, by focusing on the Ingenic platform, you can be assured that your camera will actually work once installed. That was not my experience with OpenIPC.
I think the biggest difference I could see is that OpenIPC targets Europe as its main market, whereas thingino is US/Canada and is easier to get started with.
Honestly, I couldn't find a single Amazon ASIN for anything listed on OpenIPC.
It's not much help for them to support more devices if none of those are being imported into the US.
Compare to thingino, which has support for Wyze, Eufy, Wansview, Cinnado, Imou, TP-Link and lots of other brands which are officially imported into the US and are best-sellers in their respective categories on Amazon, with the free Fulfilled-by-Amazon shipping.
The cheapest supported camera, aside from a given you as a gift, is Jooan A2R from Temu. It is like $3 per piece, brand new. It is a nice little pan/tilt model with a low-end 720p sensor. But it is fast, nice looking, snappy and dirt cheap.
I'm seeing $9.66 on Temu. The description update on this video explains that it's due to tariffs (is it cheaper outside the US?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeA8wOEe34
I just installed this on my Wyse cam 2 after using the defang hacks for years. This works all the same but it is much better. Having working night vision where it isn't just randomly enabling the IR filter is great.
Upgrade from dafang was easy if you follow the guide on the github wiki. Getting RTSP working was strange as it wouldn't work over IP but did over local DNS entry, but that's the only issue I've found so far.
It's still a pretty hard question to answer, given how specific model numbers are sometimes missing on sales listings, and silent revisions to hardware.
in most cases you can tell at a glance. We have run into vendors changing their internals without any way of telling other than opening the cam up. Last year mos vendors started moving their cameras from the T31 processor to the newer (cheaper) T23, without changing model names. I've bought at least one cam where one user got an Ingenic chip and I got some random ARM chip.. and a few cases where they have a few wifi chip options and its a coin toss which one you get. When possible I try to account for this in my installers, so that the user doesn't need to deal with it themselves, but other times its unavoidable.
What does the firmware do, practically? Can I use the firmware on my Wyze cameras as a drop-in replacement? Will the cameras still talk to the Wyze app?
I guess my question is: from a practical viewpoint, what do I get with this firmware (other than that it is open and all that, which I totally appreciate).
Thingino is a replacement of the stock firmware. But you obviously lose the ability to use vendor's cloud. Because if you still want to use the subscription service, why would you need to replace the stock firmware?
> The Ingenic Zeratul, Atlas, and Tassadar platforms are a series of System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions designed primarily for battery-powered IoT cameras and smart home devices.
These projects are very cool, especially if you're stuck with a crappy "app only" camera. But lack of even rudimentary AI motion detection and alerting is a bit of a deal breaker.
By my understanding that isn't usually the job of the camera itself, they don't have the processing power to do it at a reasonable speed, so I wouldn't expect this firmware to offer it.
That sort of task is usually done by the software that reads from the cameras, be that something local like https://frigate.video/ or the cloud-based ML of the manufacturer of your camera.
My guess is that these processors are so underpowered that they're incapable of doing anywhere close to the true AI. So, what'd you'd do, is a regular motion detection (this thing does support that, right?), and then apply the AI at the processing layer on the NAS.
The Ingenic processors actually have some AI capability, but our firmware is just at the early stages of trying to incorporate it. You're still better off using Frigate or similar!
We have basic motion detection and alerting in Thingino. You can send alerts (with stills or video clips) to email, telegram, and several other targets.
That's my video. I'm indeed one of the developers but my contributions are mostly around adding new devices, creating installers when possible, and doing most of the Youtube content!
Readit News
OpenIPC: Open IP Camera Firmware — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758463 — Aug 2025 (106 comments)
The cheapest camera that you can install this onto, is Cinnado D1, which retails at under $14.99 USD FBA on Amazon Prime in the US:
https://github.com/wltechblog/thingino-installers/tree/main/...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP — ≤ $14.99 FBA for Cinnado D1, #3 best-seller in "Dome Surveillance Cameras"
Some older Wansview, TP-Link, Wyze and Imou are also supported.
Part of the reason these cams are sold so cheap, and are directly imported into the US by the brand owners, is because they're making all of their money from the subscriptions. It's also the reason why buying a single camera is actually cheaper than buying a pack.
One neat thing about openipc is that it supports a huge range of SoC. Example link. https://openipc.org/cameras/vendors/hisilicon
Also, by focusing on the Ingenic platform, you can be assured that your camera will actually work once installed. That was not my experience with OpenIPC.
Honestly, I couldn't find a single Amazon ASIN for anything listed on OpenIPC.
It's not much help for them to support more devices if none of those are being imported into the US.
Compare to thingino, which has support for Wyze, Eufy, Wansview, Cinnado, Imou, TP-Link and lots of other brands which are officially imported into the US and are best-sellers in their respective categories on Amazon, with the free Fulfilled-by-Amazon shipping.
Upgrade from dafang was easy if you follow the guide on the github wiki. Getting RTSP working was strange as it wouldn't work over IP but did over local DNS entry, but that's the only issue I've found so far.
First thing I want to know is "do I have this hardware".
These guys do it right.
I guess my question is: from a practical viewpoint, what do I get with this firmware (other than that it is open and all that, which I totally appreciate).
How would I, a random user, go about getting this functionality with Thingino?
Seems like someone at Ingenic is a StarCraft fan!
https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Zeratul-...
That sort of task is usually done by the software that reads from the cameras, be that something local like https://frigate.video/ or the cloud-based ML of the manufacturer of your camera.
Motion detection works fine of course.
https://youtu.be/QQV6vjzhylg
This looks like a great project!